How could you ever tell if you're a skeptic, or a pseudo-skeptic? After-all, every pseudo-skeptic thinks they have the facts on their side, just like every other crank who ever lived. This is a way to tell for yourself, and it's not easy, and most people go to the grave believing in bullshit.

Not building one aircraft carrier is replaced by growth in the energy and infrastructure sector. It should create more jobs, since it will employ a wider array of low tech workers, who will save less, and in turn demand more goods and services from the economy. All I'm saying is that the government could re-prioritize a small amount of the military budget, and we'd be well on track to rebuilding the energy infrastructure into something more robust that can shuffle around large amounts of renewable energy sources a la what is seen in Europe and China.

In the real world, where economists measure these things, and such taxes have been implemented, carbon taxes reduce power bills for businesses and residents. There are other more ambitious examples. The part you might have missed is that the tax is revenue neutral. Every tax dollar collected goes back to the people paying the electricity bill. So your bill goes up $1 and then goes down $1. It shouldn't take too much thought to work out why such a procedure reduces peoples electricity bills overall -- its just basic high school level economics. Look it up if your interested.

Haha, you really missed the point of this:

And who said I'm self-educated. You have no idea, right? right!

Haha, I think it was a joke =0. All my politics steams from a scientific epistemology, which means I have little sympathy for what the GOP has become in recent years. If you are interested in understand the world, you'd put down your favorite media, and educate yourself, in the sense of learning about exactly what makes your ears burns and leaves a pit in your stomach, most smart people cannot do that, and the ability to do that is was separates a person to actually know something.

I assume you understand why someone might want to mandate (1), (2), and (3), and you also realize the impact to everyone. Not saying that I agree with these issues, but am saying that I think you really don't understand them, but are sure you know who the bad guys are.

Not with a revenue neutral carbon tax.

Wow, that makes you sound far better than the average sheeple out there. I mean, you couldn't possibly be being lead around by the nose. Said every ideologue in all of history.

Deference to authority *and* paranoia have strong biological bases. So is thinking we're better than others. It's amazing how much of ourselves we reveal in just a few words.

Well I believe in pixies, and I'm right and you are not. Now, what does science have to say on the pixie issue? WHO CARES!!!!

A revenue neutral carbon tax would have none of these effects. Your number (5) is just catastrophiying.

That's not really true. There will be big changes for the coal/oil industry, but most people wouldn't notice the difference of a transition to a low carbon economy. The notion that there will be huge changes and destructive regulations is just a tired little canard that gets pulled out by every industry that is facing down government interference. Remember, regulating CFCs and SO2 was also supposed to *ruin* the economy. The US government could not build one aircraft carrier to pay for the needed infrastructure.

"Skeptics" talking science is like listening to New Agers go on about the quantum theory of consciousness. They both think the science is on their side. Both have a few crank scientists who support their cause. The vast majority of scientists just shake their heads and get back to work.

Methane's time course is about 2 years. CO2 lasts for 1000s of years. That makes is a much worse problem.

Lambda are the one feature that keeps me using C++. Once you grok functional programming, you'll never do with out. Writing whole functor classes is a huge amount of work, and error prone, for the type of things I need them for. There's a reason why old C++ code didn't make heavy use of them -- yet if you go into the world of functional programming, they are everywhere, and your code is much shorter and more predictable.

My old supervisor was convinced that a certain portion of people simply don't ever make the cognitive leap.

(1) Where any emails deleted?

(2) Did you ever get the other side of the story

(3) Smears the the fallback for not being able to make an academic argument.